"Sun takes on Passport -- with Hardware"

"Sun brings antitrust suit against Microsoft"

"Sun alliance targets Microsoft Passport"

Sun's wasting its time.

not since Philippe Kahn ran Borland has a company been so suicidally compelled to take on Microsoft at every turn. the return on all of this investment (in Java, in Sun ONE, in the Liberty Alliance, in their lawsuit) is questionable -- i can see where Borland, Covalent, and even IBM have benefitted from the Java push, but Sun must be taking most of the damage for doing nearly all of the heavy lifting.

all the while, Sun's fighting what has to be a completely hopeless rear-guard action against cheap hardware fromIntel and even cheaper software from the open-source community. the Reg is reporting that AOL's on the verge of signing a services deal with Red Hat to transition its high-end, proprietary UN*X servers to much cheaper Linux boxes.

AOL number-crunchers figure they can replace an $80,000 box running proprietary UNIX with two $5,000 Linux boxes and get a 50% increase in performance in addition to the cost savings. "Don't tell our competitors," one of our AOL contacts says. "Let them keep buying expensive crap."

while Sun exhausts itself flailing away against Microsoft, it's going to lose its bread-and-butter business to companies like Red Hat and IBM (and whatever interchangeable hardware vendor choses to fill the breech). as for Microsoft, they have the advantage of having a don't-you-worry-we'll-make-sure-it-all-works solution for their clients: stay within the Microsoft universe, and you're generally comfortable that your Microsoft developer tools will work with Microsoft platforms, servers, and services. (via the Reg)

there's nothing more unsatisfying than spending your day staring at HTML and CSS in a text editor, flipping from browser to browser, wondering what miserable little mistake/bug/quirk is causing your site to render so god-awfully.

CANAL+ Technologies, the digital television technology unit of global media giant Vivendi Universal, is suing rival NDS Group, the digital television technology unit of global media giant News Corp.

both companies make smart cards for digital TV set-top boxes, a critical element in the secure delivery of digital satellite and cable programming. a smart card, when inserted into a set-top box, determines whether a subscriber has permission to watch a particular program. CANAL+ Technologies is alleging that NDS deliberately cracked their proprietary encryption software and then maliciously distributed the code on the internet in an effort to harm CANAL+'s business. they're claiming that the flood of counterfit CANAL+ smart cards harmed them to the tune of over $1 billion. CANAL+ is so steamed about this, they've launched their own web site.

while NDS Group is a publicly-traded company, they're 80% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. while i'm skeptical we'll hear about e-mail from Peter Chernin directing NDS to sabotage CANAL+, i'm revelling in the small comeuppance this lawsuit affords -- no one has been more belligerent in their demands for the technology industry to cripple their products in the service of Big Content. as Chernin told the Senate Commerce Committee recently:

What the general public has to realize is that many businesses that rely on the creation, distribution and sale of content will be put in jeopardy by massive copyright infringement. This, in turn, will impact the quality of content that makes the broadband Internet so exciting for so many people.

(via Wall Street Journal)